Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2022.
Pp. viii, 443, $35 hardcover.
For those who care about freedom, these are difficult times. Whether it has been the extension of state power courtesy of COVID or the sense that economic liberty is under siege across the globe, those who genuinely care about the growth and maintenance of free societies seem to be a small tribe indeed. These days, collectivists of the left and right abound.
Such circumstances, however, are not new. Those whom the French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville called “true friends of liberty” are never numerous. There have always been libertines (those who separate freedom from a concern for moral truth) as well as those anxious to radically curtail freedom in the name of authority or an ever-leveling equality. Few are those who have held fast to Lord Acton’s dictum: “Liberty [is] not … the power of doing what we
